Going to the MLA Convention in Chicago? Here are all the sessions on children and YA literature, and on comics. Or, at least, this is what I could find. If I’ve missed anything, please let me know. Thanks!

Respondent

Description: Comics studies is a growing interdisciplinary field, largely (although not always) grounded in critical literary techniques. As comics scholarship grows, however, the potential of comics for researchers in other disciplines, history among them, is quickly becoming apparent. Panelists address the variety of ways that scholars can use comics as sources for historical research by showcasing projects that utilize sequential narratives in this way.

In 1969, Sesame Street made its debut on PBS in the U.S. It has since become not just an American institution, but an international one — broadcast in 150 countries, and in over 30 languages. This show — as cross-media and transnational phenomenon — is thus an ideal subject for the MLA’s textual transactions theme, as it invites us to think transnationally about “intellectual, artistic, and pedagogical work.” This panel invites papers on Sesame Street as a site of transaction — creative, cultural, educational. Possible areas of inquiry include but are not limited to:

How the programme’s many international iterations interact with the original concepts and their particular audience.

The show’s many political initiatives, both within and beyond the U.S. Since the first international co-productions in 1972 (Brazil’s Vila Sesamo and Mexico’s Plaza Sesamo), co-productions throughout the show’s history have promoted many social justice initiatives through Sesame Workshop International, including the introduction of HIV positive muppet Kami in the South African version (Takalini Sesame), and the Kosovo co-production (Rruga Sesam/Ulica Sezam) that supported the peace process between Albanian and Serbian children.

How Sesame Street’s many changes in the past five decades respond to the media landscape it inhabits. Sesame Street now has a popular YouTube channel, and as of 2016 its first-run episodes air on HBO, not PBS.

How the Muppets’ comic mode of engagement often upends the concept of a distinct audience constituted solely of child viewers, and challenges protectionist discourses around what are considered “appropriate” media texts produced for young audiences. While the history of Sesame Street has situated the Muppets as part of a public mandate geared at preschool children (Davis; Reimer), the parodic, vaudevillian, and often subversive humor that characterizes the Muppets (Abate; Schildcrout) have been central features throughout the history of Sesame Street’s programming.

How Sesame Street inhabits a dynamic position within popular culture, particularly how characters have been remixed and/or deployed politically (for example, Bert and Ernie and marriage activism).

Sesame Street‘s role as a surrogate caregiver, especially via its recognition of the complex emotional lives of children. Beginning with the death of Will Lee (the actor who played Mr. Hooper) in 1983, Sesame Street has been a leader in children’s television for dealing with serious subjects: death, down syndrome, autism, loss and grief following 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, children with incarcerated parents, children in military families coping with a parent’s deployment.

If accepted by the MLA, the panel will convene at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago, which will be held from January 3 to 6, 2019.

January 3rd through 7th is the Modern Language Association’s annual conference, held this year (2018) in New York City. (The year’s Presidential Theme is “States of Insecurity.”) As I do each year, I’m posting here all panels devoted to children’s literature, young adult literature, and comics/graphic novels. There will be many other panels of interest, I’m sure. So, do peruse the program for full details. And if I’ve omitted a panel on any of these subjects, please let me know and I will add it ASAP.

Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum: Business Meeting

The open meeting will begin shortly after Session 298 is completed. The assigned room for the business meeting is snug, but we will try to accommodate everyone who attends. One of the orders of business will be the selection of sessions to be sponsored by the Forum for next year’s MLA Conference in Chicago. It would be helpful for individuals who would like to propose a session to provide a short handout to be distributed during the business meeting. The proposed sessions handouts should include: 1. A working title 2. A short (at least a paragraph) description and 3. The name of a current MLA members willing to chair the session.

Individuals unable to attend this year’s MLA conference, or unable to attend the Forum’s business meeting, can still submit topics for sessions for the 2019 MLA Conference in Chicago. Those proposals should be in the same format as the handouts for proposed sessions. The requirements are noted above. Session proposals for those unable to attend the business meeting should be submitted by email to Jan Susina (jcsusina@ilstu.edu) by December 21.

354: Graphic Resistance: Comics and Social Protest

Description

This session investigates how and why comics have served as sites of resistance and explores how this history informs how comics are used—or could be used—for protest in our current moment. Participants explore genealogies of social protest that comics create in and across local, national, and international communities. How will this conversation open different future trajectories for exploring comics as micropolitical sites of resistance?

Keywords

650: Ignite Talk: Alison Bechdel on the Page, Onstage, and in Theory

Saturday, January 06, 2018. 03:30 PM – 04:45 PM. Hilton: Beekman

Description

Ten years after the conclusion of Dykes to Watch Out For, twelve years after the graphic memoir Fun Home, and five years after Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s theatrical adaptation of Fun Home, this ignite talk session offers a spectrum of voices, perspectives, and theoretical approaches to the works of Bechdel, demonstrating not just analysis of a single author across genres but the impact of such texts on wider fields of study.

Books can encourage children to question rather than accept the world as it is. Literature for young people can invite them to imagine a world where black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, poverty does not limit one’s life choices, LGBTQ youth know they are loved, indigenous peoples’ rights are respected, the disabled have equal rights and opportunities, refugees find refuge, and climate change does not imperil life on this planet.

This guaranteed session (sponsored by the Children’s Literature Forum) examines children’s literature as a vehicle for social change. Subjects panelists might consider include (but are not limited to): Children as activists, books aligned with social movements, satire or humor as catalyst for change, the repurposing of children’s culture as means of expressing or inspiring adults’ activism. Papers may cover any country or historical period.

Ahem. Here are all the sessions on children’s literature and/or comics/graphic novels at the 2017 MLA in Philadelphia. What do I mean by “all”? Well, I did not count sessions with a single paper on comics/graphic novels. To be included here, at least 50% of the session must be devoted to children’s/YA literature, comics/graphic novels, or cultures of childhood more generally. If I wasn’t sure, I erred on the side of inclusion.

Note: Clicking on the session number will take you directly to the MLA’s on-line program, which is my source for all of this information.

Participants examine graphic narrative and modernism from a critical stance shaped by emphasis on comics as formal container for responses to modernity. We pay attention to narrative and its devices; print technology, artistic medium, and their relation to aesthetics; and memory and the conceptual.

Once considered pure pulp, comics now prevail in architecture studios, psychoanalytic institutes, and university classrooms, as well as in myriad public spaces. This session represents architecture, psychoanalysis, educational psychology, and literature to consider the ways that comics “bound” over disciplinary silos to capture buildings, bodies, and minds in lived environments.

The presentations query how historical moments give rise to the episodic or serial forms they need (or deserve?). With topics including modernist drama, Dada art exhibitions, children’s films, comic books, and the realist novel, the panelists use a PechaKucha format of automatically advancing slides—an innovative style fitting for a session on series and episodes.

Panelists explore how the visual medium of comics paradoxically explores invisible mental illnesses by depicting internal emotional and mental states. They also consider the historical relation between comics and mental illness and discuss how comics can create communities of people who feel—or are—invisible within society at large.

Scholars working in Victorian studies, art history, queer theory, film studies, and children’s literature and childhood studies discuss how the controversial work of James R. Kincaid has transformed their fields.

In September 2015, photos of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi — his corpse washed ashore on a Turkish beach — came to symbolize the urgency of the Syrian refugee crisis. World leaders promised to do more, people debated whether printing the pictures was appropriate, and charities experienced a surge in donations. In children’s literature, the figure of the child as refugee, migrant, or displaced citizen has long been a powerful trope, disrupting the assumed connection between personal identity and national identity, exposing virulent racism and xenophobia, but also awakening compassion and kindness. As Europe faces its largest refugee crisis since World War II, this guaranteed session (sponsored by the Children’s Literature Forum) will examine children’s literature’s response — both contemporary and historical — to refugees, migrants, and members of diasporic communities.

Subjects panelists might consider include (but are not limited to): the ways in which the term “migrant” can dehumanize people, whether persecuted minorities qualify for refugee status in their own countries, the many reasons for displacement (race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality), questions concerning human rights,and how the vulnerable figure of the child brings these questions into sharper focus.

The panel will convene at the Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, which will be held from January 5 to 8, 2017.

Attending MLA in Austin, Texas this January? These are all MLA sessions devoted* to children’s literature, children’s culture, or comics/graphic novels. There are other panels with individual papers on these subjects, but (to the best of my knowledge) these are the sole panels with a central focus on these areas of inquiry. If I’ve missed any panels, let me know!

_________

* N.B.: For the purposes of this document, “devoted” means that 50% or more of the panel addresses the subject matter. I assembled this via keyword searches of the conference program.

In the 1970s and 1980s, underground comics provided an opportunity for less dominant groups to form communities by representing alternative kinds of experience. Panelists aim to open up the conversation on underground comics to include the ignored voices, such as those of women, minorities, and LGBT communities in San Francisco and elsewhere in the United States.

Participants discuss how they have used comics and graphic novels to design unique courses in composition, language, literature, and new media, offering overlapping perspectives in program creation, multimodal integration, gender and cultural studies, and project-based learning. The session welcomes audience participation to discuss new approaches in teaching comics.

Because children’s literature is so popular, and children’s literature studies is an interdisciplinary field, scholars of young people’s literature have always addressed multiple publics—work continued today through social media. What are the risks and rewards of this more expansive, inclusive kind of work? Who does it? How is it valued? Should it be valued more, and—if so—why?

Heading to the MLA in Vancouver next month? Well, thanks to Lee Talley (for the children’s lit panels), here’s a list of all the children’s literature and comics/graphic novels panels. If we’ve missed any, then please let me know and I’ll add them!

The roundtable brings together established and emerging scholars in comics studies to discuss an acclaimed contemporary comics artist, Joe Sacco. The discussion focuses on Sacco’s significance to both literary and comics studies, as well as the challenges that his “comics journalism” poses to the categories and methods of analysis in comics studies.

76. The Endurance of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at 150

643. A Creative Conversation with the Canadian Poet JonArno Lawson

A creative conversation about avant-garde children’s poetry, Canadian poetry, and Canadian children’s poetry with the award-winning poet JonArno Lawson. Lawson is a three-time winner of the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry.

644. Cash Bar Arranged by the Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives

This roundtable analyzes interdisciplinary approaches to studying comics. Comics theory includes semiotics, film theory, linguistics, visual studies, and narrative theory, among other disciplines. The scholars examine to what extent these discourses are in conversation with one another and seek connections among them.

Scholars of Children’s Literature, Young Adult Literature, Children’s Culture! Attention! Here are some calls for papers, for the 2015 Modern Language Association, held from January 8 to 11, 2015, in Vancouver, British Columbia. All are sponsored or co-sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division. Send in a proposal to one of the organizers! Come to Vancouver! (Whether or not you present, do come to Vancouver, if you can. It’s a beautiful city — one of my favorite cities, in fact.)

Geography and Memory in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. DUE 15 March 2014

Investigating the conference theme of “Negotiating Sites of Memory,” this panel considers the ideological and spatial implications of physical places depicted in children’s and young adult literature. The geographies of these texts demonstrate that constructions of places and people are related processes. In works for young people, the material and the social are mutually constitutive, shaping and reflecting environments that depend on the discursive and/or physical participation of child characters and child readers alike. Importantly, these geographies as produced through literature are imagined representations rather than tangible locations, a gap that explicitly invites the contributions of memory, nostalgia, and fantasy.

Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:

Place’s role in the development of a children’s literature canon

The role of nostalgia and/or memory in shaping depictions of place in writing for children

The sustained hold of specific places in children’s and YA literature on cultural imaginations and memory, including the Hundred Acre Wood, Toad Hall, the Four-Story Mistake, Mr. Brown’s antique shop, Hogwarts, Panem, the Island of the Blue Dolphins, and many others

Regionalism in children’s and YA literature

Virtual places and spaces in digital literature and/or media for young people

The geographies of books themselves as physical artifacts of material culture

Please send 500-word abstracts by March 15, 2014 to Kate Slater at slaterks@plu.edu and Gwen Athene Tarbox at gwen.tarbox@wmich.edu. Panelists will need to be members of the MLA by April 7, 2014.

This guaranteed panel is sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division. The 2015 MLA will be held in Vancouver, BC from January 8-11, 2015.

Sites of Memory in Children’s Literature. DUE 15 Mar. 2014

Remembering, remembrance, memory, and forgetting shapes children’s literature: authors’ personal memories of childhood that inform their texts or are preserved in cross-written texts or memoirs; larger cultural memories adults wish to pass down to future generations; and events, incidents, and topics elided or “forgotten” in the canon. Indeed, the genre of children’s literature relies on the remembrance, reinterpretation, or revision of past works. This panel invites papers considering all aspects of memory in children’s and young adult literature (historical, literary, nostalgic, patriotic, personal, repressed, traumatic, etc.) as well as papers that explore how literary memory shapes the canon of children’s and YA literature through intertextuality, another site of memory.

Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:

Traumatic memories: how they’re represented in individual works as well as how they’re presented to younger readers

Iconic texts about remembrance: anything to do with war, but also “holiday” books and texts about important historical events

Please send 500-word proposals by March 15 to Karin Westman at westmank@ksu.edu.

This guaranteed panel is sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division. The 2015 MLA will be held in Vancouver, BC from January 8-11, 2015.

World War I in Children’s Literature. DUE: 27 Feb. 2014

Children at home dream of war; children in war zones dream of home. War poets such as Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves were haunted by childhood narratives of home and play, to the point where they were interpreting their own immediate experience through lenses tinted by memory and childish linguistic patterns; novelists such as L.M. Montgomery, Kate Seredy, and Ethel Turner became increasingly obsessed with the identity of place and how war expands (and sometimes explodes) a community’s sense of self. Through picture books and graphic novels, fiction and nonfiction, this session invites us to pause, in this centenary of the Great War, and consider how both immediate and more long-term memories of the war were shaped by children’s literature of the period and how they are continually reshaped by contemporary authors and illustrators using very diverse techniques, including such artists as Michael Morpungo, Diana Preston, Penelope Farmer, Jacques Tardi, Jim Murphy, Kevin Major, David Hill, and Sonya Hartnett. For consideration in this unguaranteed MLA session, please send a 350-word abstract to Jacquilyn Weeks (weeksj@iupui.edu) and Lissa Paul (lpaul@brocku.ca) by February 27th, 2014.

The MLA session will be comprised of three speakers, each of whom will have 15-20min to present their research on this topic. These presentations will be followed by a 15-30min open Q&A. We’ll be looking for a set of three papers that present the strongest and most original arguments while adhering to our general guidelines.

The focus in this context is on research rather than the pragmatic details of publishing or a detailed description of published literature; however, we’d be very interested in a paper that thinks about patterns of contemporary Canadian children’s literature and it’s engagement with the First World War. You would be welcome to offer an analysis of your own work. The 350-word abstract should outline your central argument and give us a sense of what you would discuss in your 15-20min paper.

This non-guaranteed panel is sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division. The 2015 MLA will be held in Vancouver, BC from January 8-11, 2015.

Visual Cultures and Young People’s Texts in Canada. DUE 15 Mar. 2014

Exploring visual culture produced by, for, and about young people in Canada, including comics, animation, picture books, photography, and digital forms. 350 word abstracts by 15 March 2014; Jennifer Blair (Jennifer.blair@uottawa.ca) and Catherine Tosenberger (ctosen@gmail.com).

This non-guaranteed panel is co-sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division and the MLA’s Canadian Literature in English Discussion Group. The 2015 MLA will be held in Vancouver, BC from January 8-11, 2015.

With thanks to Craig Svonkin for assembling the children’s literature panels list and Charles Hatfield for assembling the comics panels list, here’s a list of panel sessions on either children’s literature or comics/graphic novels at the Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago, 9-12 January 2014. Is there anything missing here? Drop me a line, and I’ll add it.

This roundtable will address how the English Language Arts Standards of the Common Core State Standards (www.corestandards.org) will affect the teaching of college courses in children’s and adolescent literature, given that many of the students enrolled in these courses are preparing for careers in K–12 education.

This session has been chosen by MLA President Marianne Hirsch to be part of the presidential theme, “Vulnerable Times.”

“Not Made to Be Looked at with ‘Aesthetic’ Eyes”: Boxed Works by Chris Ware and Marcel Duchamp,” Jonathan R. Bass, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

Sunday, 12 January 2014

691. Broadway Babies

8:30–9:45 a.m., Great America, Chicago Marriott

A special session

Presiding: Donelle Ruwe, Northern Arizona Univ.

“Belting: The Construction of Childhood Voice in Annie,” James Leve, Northern Arizona Univ.

“‘There’s Going to Be a Change in This Workhouse’: Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and Postwar Youth Culture,” Marc Napolitano, United States Military Acad.

“Urchins, Unite: Newsies as an Antidote to Annie,” Marah Gubar, Univ. of Pittsburgh

Abstract: “Broadway Babies” examines Annie, Oliver!, and Newsies, musicals in which the child is at first isolated, unloved, and impoverished and then is brought into a nurturing, albeit non-traditional, “family.” As the panelists demonstrate, these shows’ dual fantasy of the vulnerable child in need of rescue and the redemptive child who rescues others is complicated by the medium of musical theater.

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